There was no waking up.
Arin didn't open eyes—he just appeared, as if someone had dragged his mind out of a grave and dropped it into a place that wasn't a place at all.
For a moment, everything felt still.
Too still.
Like the world was holding its breath.
Then the stillness cracked.
A faint whisper slithered across the darkness, not a voice, not sound—just a feeling crawling into his skull:
[…online…]
He tried to look around, but there was no "around."
Just fragments of something—code? memories? hallucinations?—fluttering like broken glass.
A childhood memory flashed:
His mother calling him.
Warm kitchen light.
A bowl of steam.
Then it shattered into static.
The static turned into numbers.
The numbers turned into pain.
He heard something that felt like metal scraping against his thoughts:
[Error: Identity mismatch]
[Error: Consciousness drift detected]
Arin tried to speak, but the moment he formed a word, the darkness swallowed it and spat out another memory—this one wrong.
His father's face, but with glowing eyes.
The lab, but upside down.
The explosion, happening in reverse… and then forward… and then sideways.
Reality twisted like wet cloth.
He wanted to scream.
But another message cut through the distortion:
[Stabilizing…]
[…Stabilizing....]
[FAILED]
Something snapped inside him—not physically, but like a string breaking in a piano.
A sudden glitch ripple tore across everything.
The darkness wavered like a broken hologram.
He felt himself fall but there was no ground.
He kept falling for minutes, or seconds, or years.
Time didn't exist here.
Time was a rumor.
Another distorted message flickered in:
[Reconstruction… running corrupted sequence]
A door appeared.
Just a door, floating in the void.
He didn't walk toward it—he simply became closer, like the world had jumped frames.
His hand reached out, or maybe it didn't, because he wasn't sure if he even had hands.
When he touched the door, it dissolved into ash.
Behind it was a lab.
His lab.
Except it wasn't.
The tables were bent. The machines were melted into the floor. The security cameras were blinking in slow, unnatural pulses.
And in the center was his own body.
Or what was left of it.
Burnt. Twisted.
Still smoking.
Arin stepped back but didn't feel his feet move.
The corpse's head turned toward him with a horrible creaking sound.
Its mouth opened…
and a distorted, machine-like version of his own voice crawled out:
"Why did you run?"
Arin's thoughts scattered.
He felt something pushing into him, through him—like wires forcing their way into a human brain.
The corpse spoke again, glitching between tones:
"Why… did… you… leave… me… here…?"
Arin tried to answer, but the figure dissolved into code.
The room dissolved too.
Everything collapsed into a single violent burst of white noise.
And from inside that noise, a cold whisper emerged:
[Welcome, AR-0N.]
[Your mind is no longer yours.]
The white noise faded.
All that remained was a heartbeat.
Not his heartbeat.
Something else.
Something waking up.